Dr John Mcaleer

• The British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• The East India Company and its worlds.
• Islands and empires.
• Travel, exploration, and cultures of collecting.
• Museums, material culture, and the representation of empire.

My current research is focused around three broad themes: voyages and travels; islands and empire; and the afterlives of the East India Company. My most recent monograph, published by Oxford University Press in 2023, explores eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century voyages through the Atlantic Ocean. In particular, it concentrates on the experiences of those passengers on board East India Company ships as they travelled on the first leg of their journeys to Asia. As well as considering the shipboard experiences of these passengers, the book also explores their engagement with various Atlantic islands, societies and people, and their use of the Atlantic as a ‘testing ground’ for a range of discursive strategies and scientific theories. This work builds on themes first touched upon while researching Britain’s Maritime Empire (2016), and developed in my contribution to the ‘Islands’ companion volume to the Oxford History of the British Empire series (2021). I am also interested in the various afterlives of the East India Company: the ways in which the legacies and reputation of the Company have been represented in the years following its dissolution in 1858. And I maintain an interest in the practicalities and logistics of collecting practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.